


What Am I?

by Raynidreams



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-13
Updated: 2011-11-13
Packaged: 2017-10-26 01:12:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/276910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raynidreams/pseuds/Raynidreams
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Setting: Revelations.  Another version of the beach scene.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Am I?

"What am I?"  

 ****

So profound a question.  So fundamental an entreaty.  Especially so when the other question about life has already been answered for her and she has no choice in that now - she is already dead.  She only has this, whatever this is.  Whatever she may be. ****

He'd told her once that he loved her.  Told her many times in fact.  He'd told her that he wanted her to see the truth of her life and all that, that entailed.  He’d urged her to grasp onto the path.  To absorb it.  To follow it as blindly as he had always been blind to anything beside her.  
   
Blind.

He feels a silent bitter laugh build inside of him at this.  A mocking of the poor battle he's made between his base desires, his ego and his faith.  A taunting of his single mindedness in the assumption that he was right.  Because, for all his guidance, for all his love, all he's done is condone murder and then lead her here to this twisted and wretched end.  

He's responsible for so much death.  He’s guilty for that wreck of a ship and the shattered bones inside of it.  

The laugh within him dies.  
   
Whatever she is, and whatever happens from now on in, he'll be what she wants.  Be whatever she needs.  He won't run from her.  He won't shy away from his crimes.  He'll stay.  He deserves to be punished because he’d listened and not questioned the plan in the beginning.  Then he'd forced her to heed to his misguided visions, to accept her destiny and her fate and look what it had come to?  Her ending.  Her death on a ruined and broken planet that will never fulfil their dreams.  A soiled world that cannot offer a the dregs of their civilisation a future past the violence of the war.  

A war he helped to plot.  
   
There is no absolution for him now.  Only penance.  
   
He falls to his knees just as her voice stirs in his ears with that question again.  "What am I?"  It’s an abject plea this time.  Not scathing but beaten.  Her repeated screams have eaten at and then left her voice ragged and torn.  The words sounding as desolate as this place – as strangled and as blasted as the dead-alive trees that grow blackened on the shore around them.  As harsh as the gale that blows the poisoned water up into their faces.    
   
So raw and so lost.

He hunches over on the ground, grasping the ashes and the dirt below his fingers.  Within it, the shards of fused glass slice ribbons into his palms.  He needs to feel something.  Needs to make sure that he’s not strayed into a nightmare.  Fallen between the veils of life and death now that resurrection is not to be, and there disappeared into the embrace of the harbinger.  
   
The pain in his hands is real.  The cold on his face and seeping into his knees is real.   
   
He looks from his hands up to her.    
   
Harbinger.   
   
The threads of her spirit have been always been inside his chest.   
   
He can’t leave.  And he can’t run away inside his mind to madness either.  She deserves more.  
   
He silently pleads for her forgiveness while wondering if this shade before him has any to give.    
   
This ghost.  This apparition... this herald of the apocalypse.

Finally, he tries to reply to her question when the silence has stood still between them for too long, "I... I..." but what can he say?.  There is only darkness here.  
   
His head drops.

He thinks perhaps that maybe her question was never meant for him anyway.  

Before him there’s a thud and he gives a start at the sound and impact.  He jerks up to find her kneeling and bent over just as he’d been previously.  Looking beyond her, landscaped behind is her dessicated corpse.    
   
He refuses to focus on it.  Only on her.  Tentatively, he reaches out to take her lax hand. 

She feels cold.  And she feels spent, as if all the vibrancy of life had been extinguished and now he's only touching the empty shell that once held it.   
   
 _No,_  he denies in sudden fervour.   _No_.  Because that’s not true.  The shell is behind her and in his hand is something other of her.  Something more.

Awake suddenly and stirred with resolution, he latches onto the idea to build a fire, thinking to warm her.  Thinking to use the flame as a beacon for her soul and to burn away that husk which is grinning at him from over her shoulder.  Fire as a ward against his own fears so that he can be there for hers.  
   
Animated he whispers, "Kara.  I won't leave you,  _ever_.  Not unless you want me too."

Her chin comes up.  Her eyes above are swollen with uncertainty and hurt. 

They command him to leave.  They beg him to stay.

"What can I do?  How can I ever make this right?" he asks, needing a response from her.

Her eyes close and a tear falls.

He stays with her holding her hand until she's ready to burn her remains and then return to the ships.

 _What she is?_   He still doesn't know.  But whatever she is, he can't let her go.


End file.
